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04/06/2010

Behind the scenes: All the passes of the Spain-South Korea match

The image above shows one of my lasts infographics at lainformacion.com (as a friend uses to say, the-web-that-pays-my-food). That graphic has its own little story behind, so...

The first idea about this graphic was something alike publishe at the austrian newspaper Der Standard during the Germany 2006 World Cup. Sorry, I don't have any images although I have shaken Google for long time. If somebody has, I would appreciatte it if you to send it to me.

Years after that, during Euro 2008, I was working for Público (where Álvaro Valiño, Samuel Granados, Miriam Baña, Mónica Serrano and Artur Galocha are having huge success). And many of you know how we love data visualization there. We got Geca (today OptaSpain), a service which gave us lots of statistical data, including all the passes of the match. I made this graphic for Euro 2008:

For some reasons I won't explain here, the infographic was not published. We had a 'lite version' of it, but not what we liked at the infographics department. And also, I kept thinking on how cool would it be as an online graphic But that was just impossible for us then.

Two years after, I'm at lainformacion.com and the World Cup is coming. ESpain is playing some friendly games before it. And the I remembered this graphic that kept floating on my mind. So, facing the World Cup, I decided to do something like that for the friendly games, just to check if it would be possible to do something for the World Cup games.

First problem: we don't have statistical services here. No problem. I just had to do what they do by myself: watch the match and draw all the passes. One by one. The facts:

At the beginning I though that, as in Publico, I could draw who gave the pass and who received it. Bad idea. It was just a mess. To much for one person, a TV and a ballpen. So I decided just to draw the connections between players. A line he first time two playyers are connectted and a little mark over the line all the next ones. A new page every 15 minutes. And also a new one for each replacement. Now, the graphics are published 1 h and 45 minutes after the match. I hope to do it in onehour.

Now, friendlies have 6 substitutions per game, so I'm using two fields: the initial and the final formation. For the official games (just three substitution), I'll try to make it understandable with just one field.